Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Last July, an unassuming British girl named Katharine Berry created AjaxLife, Second Life's first Web-based viewer, beating several real world companies (as here and here) to that goal by many months. Her offhand innovation was widely blogged (as here, on Boing Boing), and it's not an exaggeration to say that what Katharine created substantially changed the entire Internet industry's perspective of Second Life as an online world, and a business. (My reasons for saying so here.) For all the Lindens' efforts back then, it was not chiefly them, but this 15 year old member of Teen Second Life, who kept the world relevant. (At a time when so many were apt to dismiss it, no less.) It's not surprising, then, that the Lindens recently flew her to San Francisco to attend a user feedback session, and also presented her with an Innovation Award honorable mention.

What is surprising, perhaps, is what Katharine Berry just announced on her blog: she's leaving Teen Second Life. Work on AjaxLife will continue, but she'll no longer be part of the world her software provides access to. "Linden Lab continues to neglect the Teen Grid," she wrote there, listing her reasons, "[and] I actually can’t afford the extra 17.5% due to VAT." (With no advance warning via anonymous e-mail, the Lindens recently imposed the EU's Value Added Tax on European Residents, sending economic and cultural shockwaves through the entire Second Life community.)

Her announcement was so surprising, the loss of her presence so staggering, I contacted Katharine to explain further. She replied in detail with a set of reasons that might also explain another mystery: the unbelievably low population of Teen Second Life, while other teen-centric online worlds are so huge.

When Tateru and I began our search for genuinely popular communities in Second Life, free from camping chairs, we briefly scratched our heads over Puerto Banus, a place that's consistently crowded and in the Lindens' Top Twenty sites by foot traffic. On my first visit, I saw dozens of fashion models striding along a row of catwalks in a kind of fantasia Miami Beach locale. Must be big hangout with fashionistas, I thought, and teleported off.

Tateru wasn't as amazed: "It's just camping chairs."

I went back to double check, and so they were. The Residents weren't roleplaying models: they were fixed to an animation embedded in the floorboards, which was making their avatars automatically sashay across the catwalk like so many Tyra Banks marionettes.

In recent weeks, I've often found myself talking about this subject, both with Residents and Lindens, current and alumni like myself, so I wanted to launch this open forum and survey, to let readers offer their own opinions. Poll runs for the next week; please explain and discuss your selection in Comments. I'll forward the results to the Lindens, to seek their official response.

Monday, October 29, 2007

In late September, IBM's vast Second Life campus was inundated by an international coalition of labor union supporters, who arrived as avatars to protest a paycut levied against staffers in the company's Italy division. (Among them, a pro-labor banana and at least two off-message geometric shapes.) In recent days, there seems to be movement in the situation: reports have confirmed that IBM Italy CEO Andrea Pontremoli has resigned his post. In an announcement last week, protest organizer UniGlobal Union claims IBM has returned to the bargaining table, and describes Pontremoli's departure as a direct result of their Second Life action:

I took digital photos of my head from all angles and had it turned into a 3-D character, called an avatar. I’ll be on stage answering questions in a public forum in Second Life tomorrow night. Each person will have a chance to come on stage and literally kick my avatar in the nuts... So you could be, for example, a giant squirrel. And if your spouse asks you why you are late for dinner, just say, “I’m a giant squirrel, and I’m kicking that cartoonist guy in the nuts.” For once, it will be true.

With all the recent fuss about CBS' CSI:NY and their huge commitment to Second Life, as produced by the Electric Sheep Company, you might wonder if you're going to see them on the charts. The short
answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that they have over 100
regions, and the counting process at the moment is manual. It's just
impractical to tally them. However, keen observers report that maximum concurrency for the CSI sims for
their opening day was somewhere around 1,200, during East coast
peak times. (The number was obtained by eyeballing CSI simulators, so is
only approximate.) We're waiting on the final official tally, but
considering there's at least 55 CSI game sims and assuming hour long
visits each a day in those regions, it could potentially be up to
52,800 visits a day. But probably much less.

Why? Well, Second Life registrations as much as doubled from CSI's opening day on Wednesday through to Sunday with an extra 107,000 or so signups, but given past history, we only expect that 15-20% of those will make it through orientation, and into CSI's game sims. Not all of that 107K bump is attributable to CSI, by the way: there's been extra Second Life publicity in the New York Post (lawsuits), and other media tie-ins in the same period (The Office). Coupled with some grid problems and service outages after the CSI episode aired, the whole picture muddies considerably. In any case, we'll be contacting the Sheep and CBS to see if we can obtain more specific numbers. Smart money says they've been keeping a close eye on actual attendance.

Consequently, Armani's Second Life presence attracted just 168 estimated visits this week; not rock
bottom, saved only by Comcast which scored a mere
96. Even British sports apparel brand Reebok at 288 visits managed
better. It's a long, long way to the top ten. I'm not sure Armani can even see it
from down there.

Coming up - one of our corporates is closing their Second Life presence; Playboy still on the bounce.

A large man with a walrus mustache pulled me aside at last weekend's Virtual Worlds Forum in London to show me the latest milestone in the Lindens' open source viewer initiative. With support from IBM's UK division, the small startup Pelican Studios has created inDuality, a universal metaverse plug-in that lets you run interactive, high-resolution 3D graphics on a browser. Including, as the above screenshot shows, Second Life itself. The web-based SL interfaces created by Katharine Berry and the Japanese company behind Movable Life only provide limited access to specific Second Life features, like chat and teleporting. This offers much more than that.